How to motivate a youthful team

When the average age of your staff is 21 - with many still at college - how do you keep them productive and motivated?

At social media marketing firm Social Chain, 24-year-old CEO and cofounder Steven Bartlett says it’s about designing everything, from office space to communication tools, especially for that demographic. “Create a place where people enjoy coming to work and if they value their job they’ll fight harder to protect it and they won’t take advantage of the freedom,” he says.

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Social Chain’s Manchester warehouse has all the hallmarks of a modern headquarters - sleeping pods, office pets, a bar - but Bartlett says the way its 120 employees talk to each other is most crucial to their output.

When the company was in it’s infancy, WhatsApp was the primary communication tool. “As we grew we wanted to promote better work-life balance and allow all of us to have separation between our personal channels and our work channels,” Bartlett says.

So they switched to Facebook-run Workplace, which lets teams create a group for their client where they can drop in industry news or information that could be relevant to their social media marketing strategy as they come across it. “It’s enabled us to be more productive and more effective in our work,” Bartlett says.

This article was first published in the October 2017 issue of WIRED magazine